The Passionate Friends
"Oh clean," I answered, "clean as Eve in the garden. But can we keep
clean? Won't the shadow of our falsehoods darken at all? Come out of it
while we are still clean. Come with me. Justin will divorce you. We can
stay abroad and marry and come back."
Mary was kneeling up now with her hands upon her knees.
"Come back to what?" she cried. "Parliament?--after that? You _boy!_ you
sentimentalist! you--you duffer! Do you think I'd let you do it for your
own sake even? Do you think I want you--spoilt? We should come back to
mope outside of things, we should come back to fret our lives out. I
won't do it, Stephen, I won't do it. End _this_ if you like, break our
hearts and throw them away and go on without them, but to turn all our
lives into a scandal, to give ourselves over to the mean and the
malicious, a prey to old women--and _you_ damned out of everything! A
man partly forgiven! A man who went wrong for a woman! _No!_"
She sprang lightly to her feet and stood over me as I knelt before her.
"And I came here to be made love to, Stephen! I came here to be loved!
And you talk that nonsense! You remind me of everything--wretched!"
She lifted up her hands and then struck down with them, a gesture of
infinite impatience. Her face as she bent to me was alive with a
friendly anger, her eyes suddenly dark. "You _duffer_!" she repeated....
§ 10
Discovery followed hard upon that meeting. I had come over to Martens
with some book as a pretext; the man had told me that Lady Mary awaited
me in her blue parlor, and I went unannounced through the long gallery
to find her. The door stood a little ajar, I opened it softly so that
she did not hear me, and saw her seated at her writing-desk with her
back to me, and her cheek and eyebrow just touched by the sunlight from
the open terrace window. She was writing a note. I put my hand about her
shoulder, and bent to kiss her as she turned. Then as she came round to
me she started, was for a moment rigid, then thrust me from her and rose
very slowly to her feet.
I turned to the window and became as rigid, facing Justin. He was
standing on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid
and inexpressive and--very white. The sky behind him, appropriately
enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. So we
remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite _tableau vivant_. We two
seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first of us to
move.
He made a queer, incomplete gesture with one hand, as if he wanted to
undo the top button of his waistcoat and then thought better of it. He
came very slowly into the room. When he spoke his voice had neither rage
nor denunciation in it. It was simply conversational. "I felt this was
going on," he said. And then to his wife with the note of one who
remarks dispassionately on a peculiar situation. "Yet somehow it seemed
wrong and unnatural to think such a thing of you."
His face took on something of the vexed look of a child who struggles
with a difficult task. "Do you mind," he said to me, "will you go?"
I took a moment for my reply. "No," I said. "Since you know at last----
There are things to be said."
"No," said Mary, suddenly. "Go! Let me talk to him."
"No," I said, "my place is here beside you."
He seemed not to hear me. His eyes were fixed on Mary. He seemed to
think he had dismissed me, and that I was no longer there. His mind was
not concerned about me, but about her. He spoke as though what he said
had been in his mind, and no doubt it had been in his mind, for many
days. "I didn't deserve this," he said to her. "I've tried to make your
life as you wanted your life. It's astonishing to find--I haven't. You
gave no sign. I suppose I ought to have felt all this happening, but it
comes upon me surprisingly. I don't know what I'm to do." He became
aware of me again. "And _you_!" he said. "What am I to do? To think that
you--while I have been treating her like some sacred thing...."
The color was creeping back into his face. Indignation had come into
his voice, the first yellow lights of rising jealousy showed in his
eyes.
"Stephen," I heard Mary say, "will you leave me to talk to my husband?"
"There is only one thing to do," I said. "What is the need of talking?
We two are lovers, Justin." I spoke to both of them. "We two must go out
into the world, go out now together. This marriage of yours--it's no
marriage, no real marriage...."
I think I said that. I seem to remember saying that; perhaps with other
phrases that I have forgotten. But my memory of what we said and did,
which is so photographically clear of these earlier passages that I
believe I can answer for every gesture and nearly every word that I have
set down, becomes suddenly turbid. The high tension of our first
confrontation was giving place to a flood of emotional impulse. We all
became eager to talk, to impose interpretations and justifications upon
our situation. We all three became divided between our partial attention
to one another and our urgent necessity to keep hold of our points of
view. That I think is the common tragedy of almost all human conflicts,
that rapid breakdown from the first cool apprehension of an issue to
heat, confusion, and insistence. I do not know if indeed we raised our
voices, but my memory has an effect of raised voices, and when at last I
went out of the house it seemed to me that the men-servants in the hall
were as hushed as beasts before a thunderstorm, and all of them quite
fully aware of the tremendous catastrophe that had come to Martens. And
moreover, as I recalled afterwards with astonishment, I went past them
and out into the driving rain unprotected, and not one of them stirred
a serviceable hand....
What was it we said? I have a vivid sense of declaring not once only but
several times that Mary and I were husband and wife "in the sight of
God." I was full of the idea that now she must inevitably be mine. I
must have spoken to Justin at times as if he had come merely to confirm
my view of the long dispute there had been between us. For a while my
mind resisted his extraordinary attitude that the matter lay between him
and Mary, that I was in some way an interloper. It seemed to me there
was nothing for it now but that Mary should stand by my side and face
Justin with the world behind him. I remember my confused sense that
presently she and I would have to go straight out of Martens. And she
was wearing a tea-gown, easy and open, and the flimsiest of slippers.
Any packing, any change of clothing, struck me as an incredible
anti-climax. I had visions of our going forth, hand in hand. Outside was
the soughing of a coming storm, a chill wind drove a tumult of leaves
along the terrace, the door slammed and yawned open again, and then came
the rain. Justin, I remember, still talking, closed the door. I tried to
think how I could get to the station five miles away, and then what we
could do in London. We should seem rather odd visitors to an
hotel--without luggage. All this was behind my valiant demand that she
should come with me, and come now.
And then my mind was lanced by the thin edge of realization that she did
not intend to come now, and that Justin was resolved she should not do
so. After the first shock of finding herself discovered she had stood
pale but uncowed before her bureau, with her eyes rather on him than on
me. Her hands, I think, were behind her upon the edge of the writing
flap, and she was a little leaning upon them. She had the watchful alert
expression of one who faces an unanticipated but by no means
overwhelming situation. She cast a remark to me. "But I do not want to
come with you," she said. "I have told you I do not want to come with
you." All her mind seemed concentrated upon what she should do with
Justin. "You must send him away," he was saying. "It's an abominable
thing. It must stop. How can you dream it should go on?"
"But you said when you married me I should be free, I should own myself!
You gave me this house----"
"What! To disgrace myself!"
I was moved to intervene.
"You must choose between us, Mary," I cried. "It is impossible you
should stay here! You cannot stay here."
She turned upon me, a creature at bay. "Why shouldn't I stay here? Why
must I choose between two men? I want neither of you. I want myself. I'm
not a thing. I'm a human being. I'm not your thing, Justin--nor yours,
Stephen. Yet you want to quarrel over me--like two dogs over a bone. I
am going to stay here--in my house! It's my house. I made it. Every room
of it is full of me. Here I am!"
She stood there making this magnificently extravagant claim; her eyes
blazing blue, her hair a little dishevelled with a strand across her
cheek.
Both I and Justin spoke together, and then turned in helpless anger upon
one another. I remember that with the clumsiest of weak gestures he bade
me begone from the house, and that I with a now rather deflated
rhetoric answered I would go only with Mary at my side. And there she
stood, less like a desperate rebel against the most fundamental social
relations than an indignant princess, and demanded of us and high
heaven, "Why should I be fought for? Why should I be fought for?"
And then abruptly she gathered her skirts in her hand and advanced.
"Open that door, Stephen," she said, and was gone with a silken whirl
and rustle from our presence.
We were left regarding one another with blank expressions.
Her departure had torn the substance out of our dispute. For the moment
we found ourselves left with a new situation for which there is as yet
no tradition of behavior. We had become actors in that new human comedy
that is just beginning in the world, that comedy in which men still
dispute the possession and the manner of the possession of woman
according to the ancient rules, while they on their side are determining
ever more definitely that they will not be possessed....
We had little to say to one another,--mere echoes and endorsements of
our recent declarations. "She must come to me," said I. And he, "I will
save her from that at any cost."
That was the gist of our confrontation, and then I turned about and
walked along the gallery towards the entrance, with Justin following me
slowly. I was full of the wrath of baffled heroics; I turned towards him
with something of a gesture. Down the perspective of the white and empty
gallery he appeared small and perplexed. The panes of the tall French
windows were slashed with rain....
§ 11
I forget now absolutely what I may have expected to happen next. I
cannot remember my return to my father's house that day. But I know that
what did happen was the most unanticipated and incredible experience of
my life. It was as if the whole world of mankind were suddenly to turn
upside down and people go about calmly in positions of complete
inversion. I had a note from Mary on the morning after this discovery
that indeed dealt with that but was otherwise not very different from
endless notes I had received before our crisis. It was destroyed, so
that I do not know its exact text now, but it did not add anything
material to the situation, or give me the faintest shadow to intimate
what crept close upon us both. She repeated her strangely thwarting
refusal to come away and live with me. She seemed indignant that we had
been discovered--as though Justin had indulged in an excess of existence
by discovering us. I completed and despatched to her a long letter I had
already been writing overnight in which I made clear the hopeless
impossibility of her attitude, vowed all my life and strength to her,
tried to make some picture of the happiness that was possible for us
together, sketched as definitely as I could when and where we might meet